Alternate Americas

by Gregory Benford

  “There they are!” the Captain shouted, then turned and made way for Columbus to look. “At least a hundred vessels.”

  Columbus peered through the periscope, saw the proud galleons bending with the wind, and felt sorry for them. They had no chance to escape these iron whales sent by the greatest commercial power in the world. No army in the world could stand against the mechanized force that was massing in England. Nevertheless, he worried at the resistance to Carthaginian rule that might grow in Europe. Given the ideals of government professed by the New Carthaginian States, he saw why its leaders preferred an alliance with the English to one with a Spanish-Italian empire, but would this special relationship endure?

  “Admiral,” the Captain said at his side. “The heirs of Aeneas Oceanus and the Peacemaker’s Longhouse Nations would be pleased if you gave the command.”

  Columbus stepped back and waited for the Captain to aim and signal the rest of the fleet, so that all the blows would fall as one.

  “All is ready, Admiral,” the Captain said.

  Columbus banished his doubts and nodded, determined to be grateful that God’s providence had brought him here. Yes, God himself. “Fire all tubes!”

  As he withdrew from the figure and sat in the black silence of the virtual chamber, the historian longed for the play of events that had given Columbus his fulfillment. The Columbian Exchange of peoples, animals, foodstuffs, diseases, and knowledge would take place with more control and vision in this variant; but as with all variants prior to Panoptica, this was a transition from one dynamic state to another, with no final state envisioned. Panoptic observation could offer nothing like this inner experience. Forbidden to peer beyond its own equilibrium of observers and information, it feared to learn from the quantum sea of futures or to take the past as any guide. Panoptica, unable to stand aside from history absolutely, had stood aside in a relative way. Development continued at a trivial pace, and the historians of future Panopticas could only look back at an infinity of observers identical to themselves.

  He imagined world lines where history grew at a quantum pace, rather than creeping from state to state through an unrecordable infinity of steps. Surely, in all infinity, there had to be leaping, verbicular forms of history, where new things sprang from the unconscious soil of memory, where the brute force of deductive reason could not enumerate all joys. He wanted to throw himself into swift currents and be reshaped by time’s rough stones. He longed to be involved, even to intervene in history.

  Trembling as he leaned forward, he oriented himself in the guide monitor and reentered Columbus on the bridge of the submarine as it ran on the surface. Low clouds reflected the flames of the Roman armada burning on the horizon. Columbus felt the heat, and for an instant the pale, vicarious warmth of the flames also caressed the historian’s face.

  RED ALERT

  Jerry Oltion

  The scramble siren catapulted him out of a sound sleep. Red Cloud shuddered and sat up in bed, wincing a second time as the lights automatically switched on. In the next bunk Sitting Bull groaned and fumbled to free himself from his covers. The siren died just as the door between the two bunks opened and Brave Joseph stuck his head in.

  “Look lively!” Joseph shouted. “Trouble on the Island.”

  “Where else?” Red Cloud muttered, but Joseph was already moving down the hallway, banging on doors and bellowing orders.

  Sitting Bull staggered to his feet and began pulling flight gear from the rack. Red Cloud matched him action for action, donning G-suit, harness, survival vest, combat moccasins, and so on with practiced precision.

  “Ready to fly?” he asked as he pulled the zipper on his flight jacket up to his neck. It would be cold outside, this late in the autumn.

  For answer Sitting Bull grinned and howled a Sioux war cry at the ceiling.

  Red Cloud took up the call, and together they ran whooping from their quarters out to the airfield where their Eagle-15s waited, ground crews swarming around them. The smell of JP-4, the sharp, bladelike silhouette of the jet against the morning sky, the sound of engines already howling up to speed, all mixed with a kick of adrenaline to send Red Cloud swarming up the ladder and leaping eagerly into the cockpit of his plane.

  Helmet and shoulder straps took ten seconds. The checklist took another thirty; then he was rolling, Sitting Bull right beside him on the taxiway, less than five minutes from first alarm.

  “Eagle One ready,” he said into the helmet microphone.

  “Eagle Two ready.” Sitting Bull’s voice was tight with excitement.

  “Cleared for takeoff,” the flight controller said.

  Red Cloud rolled out onto the runway, turned, and pushed the throttles in a smooth slide all the way forward until the afterburners kicked in. Acceleration pushed him back into his seat. He watched his airspeed climb past 100, the needle a blur. At 150 he inched the stick back, and the Eagle leaped into the sky. He looked out to his left. Sitting Bull was still right beside him, half a wingspan away.

  “Course zero eight three,” the flight controller said.

  “Zero … eight … three,” Red Cloud grunted as the g-force pushed him deeper into the cushion. He centered the stick again at a forty-five-degree climb and said, “All right, we’re on our way. What’s the mission?”

  “Photo recon,” the controller said. “High-level overflight caught signs of heavy building activity in Central Park. We want you to check it out up close.”

  “How close?” Sitting Bull asked.

  “Stay on our side of the line,” control replied. “You do not have airspace-violation clearance.”

  “Damn.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Red Cloud said, but he knew how Sitting Bull felt. In his four years as a pilot, Sitting Bull had never violated the palefaces’ territory. In his seventeen years, Red Cloud had done it only once, in retaliation for the cowardly strafing of the airfield that had cost the life of Geronimo, his former wingman. It had been exhilarating, that flight into hostile territory, but that one raid had nearly started an all-out war. Never mind that the palefaces flew over Indian territory whenever they pleased, ignoring treaties and honor alike; they regarded any incursion into their territory as an act of aggression.

  And they were always claiming more airspace than they actually owned.

  Red Cloud eyed the banks of gauges and switches before him and said, “Double-check your weapons arming systems.”

  “Weapons arming systems check green,” said Sitting Bull.

  Red Cloud’s own weapons were ready as well. One flip of a switch would arm the four Tomahawk heat-seeking missiles, the four Warpath radar-guided missiles, and the two machine guns slung under his wings.

  He looked back out the windshield. The Island was coming up already. Red Cloud leveled out his Eagle at ten thousand feet and throttled back the engines to 50 percent—just enough to maintain cruising speed. He could see the skyscrapers silhouetted against the early-morning sky. Photography would be tricky in this light; shadows would be black pools that could hide anything.

  “Let’s make a sunwise circuit,” he said. That would bring them close to Central Park first, maybe before the palefaces could scramble their own fighters into the air.

  “Sounds good.” Sitting Bull backed of to give them some maneuvering distance.

  The two Eagles arrowed toward the Island. The palefaces called it Manhattan, but to the Indians it was simply the Island. Thirteen miles long, barely two miles wide, bought for all of twenty-four dollars’ worth of beads and red cloth over two centuries ago; the paleface colony had been the tail that wagged the North American dog ever since. When Red Cloud had been a kid on the plains, he’d heard so many tales of the place that he’d mistaken Greenland for it when he’d first looked at a globe. He’d been insulted to learn its true size. Insulted and alarmed; he’d shuddered to think how much trouble the palefaces could have caused if his ancestors hadn’t limited them to their one legitimate purchase, and he’d vowed that da
y to join the Iroquois Federation’s intertribal peacekeeping force to help keep them in their place.

  More than once he’d wondered why his people didn’t just wipe them out once and for all, like they’d done to the other colonies, but he always came back to the same answer. The palefaces had stolen other land, but they’d bought the Island fair and square. It was their land, and if the Indians were going to insist that the rest of the continent was Indian land, then they had to honor the palefaces’ right of ownership as well.

  But no one had to like it.

  The skyscrapers grew until the tallest—the Plymouth Building—disappeared below the Eagle’s nose. Red Cloud knew from experience that he was less than a mile from the territorial boundary. “Begin circuit,” he said, pushing his control stick to the left. The plane responded instantly with a hard left bank; he let it go to a full ninety degrees, then pulled back on the stick, the g’s shoving him deep into his seat. He kept an eye on the Hackensack River, climbing upward out his left window, and when he was heading roughly parallel with it, he banked right until he was flying level again. A quick roll confirmed his position: The Hudson was directly below him, and the Island just to his right. The tallest skyscrapers were already receding behind.

  “Start shooting,” he said, triggering the high-resolution camera in his right wingtip.

  “Rolling,” Sitting Bull said.

  Cameras whirring, they flew up the length of the Island, pulled more hard g’s at the northern end, and flew back down over the East River. Red Cloud tried to spot the activity in Central Park that might be causing interest back at base, but he couldn’t distinguish anything at this distance.

  His earphones pinged. Two green dots glowed on the right edge of his radar screen.

  “Bogeys at four,” Sitting Bull warned.

  “I see ’em.”

  “Do you have pictures, yet?” Control asked.

  “One pass, both sides,” Red Cloud answered.

  “Then return to base immediately. Do not confront paleface fighters.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Damn,” said Sitting Bull.

  “Don’t go looking for trouble,” Red Cloud reminded him. “You’ll get it soon enough in this business.” They flew a few seconds in silence, then he said, “But at least let’s let them know we were here.” He reached forward and flipped a switch on the far right of the control console, a switch he’d installed himself. Just in back of the right engine, a pressurized canister sprayed dye into the hot exhaust. Red Cloud shoved the throttles all the way forward, and his Eagle leaped ahead, leaving a streak of red smoke behind. On the east side of the Island, with the sun rising behind it, it would be visible from every building.

  Sitting Bull’s signature—written in alternating dashes of white smoke from both engines—joined Red Cloud’s as they punched through the sound barrier and left the frustrated paleface pilots behind.

  Brave Joseph caught up with them at lunch. “Eat light,” he told them, sitting down just as they began their meal. “You’re going back to the Island, and this time you get what you’ve been asking for, kid.” He punched Sitting Bull on the shoulder as the younger man’s eyes lit up with excitement. “That’s right, you’re cleared for airspace violation. Straight over Central Park. One pass east to west, you first with Red Cloud covering your tail, then the both of you get the hell back to base. We’ll have fifty planes scrambled the moment you cross the Island; let them take care of the palefaces. We want you two back here intact with photos.”

  “Photos of what?” Red Cloud asked. “What’s going on in there?”

  “Looks like the palefaces are building missile silos. We want to make sure before we scream treaty violation.”

  “Missile silos,” Red Cloud said quietly. “There’s no way they can call missiles defensive weapons.”

  “They can call ’em anything they want, once they get ’em in place,” Joseph said. “If they get first-strike capability, they’ll have us by the throats.”

  Red Cloud closed his eyes. The image of mushroom clouds rising all across the nation waited right there behind his eyelids. The palefaces had already used nuclear bombs in their war against the Turks; only a fool would suppose they wouldn’t do the same to the Indians if given a chance.

  He pushed his food away. It would be no trouble to eat light; he’d lost his appetite completely.

  They came in over Long Island, only fifty feet off the deck, dodging treetops in their effort to stay below paleface radar. At the last moment they jinked northeast, popped up to two thousand feet, and arrowed straight for Central Park, cameras running.

  Their own radar screens filled immediately with the ping of two contacts, one north of their target, one south.

  “The bastards are already in the air,” Sitting Bull muttered.

  Red Cloud waited for a second sweep. Both dots moved; the northward one was headed away from the park, but the southward one toward it. They were evidently flying patrol around the Island.

  “Looks like we’ll only have to deal with one,” Red Cloud said. He looked at the digital readout below his radar screen. “He’s at five thousand. You stay low and go for the pictures; I’ll keep him high.”

  “Got it.”

  Red Cloud pulled back on the stick and shouted his battle cry: “Geronimo!” Seconds later he crossed five thousand feet, rose to six thousand, and veered left on a course that would put him behind the paleface plane. He didn’t expect that to last long, and it didn’t; the paleface immediately rolled hard over and came straight for him.

  Which was right where Red Cloud wanted him. As the two planes flew toward one another, Sitting Bull pushed his throttles into afterburner and sped on toward Central Park unhindered.

  Red Cloud waited impatiently for the distance to close, his finger hovering over the Master Arm switch. He didn’t want to go offensive unless the paleface did, but he knew a moment’s hesitation could lose him the fight, if fight it would be, even though his weapons were better than the paleface’s. The Indians had finally pulled ahead in the long technology race with their enemies, but superior armament didn’t always win battles. The Aztecs had beaten Cortez with spears and bows, after all.

  He waited, waited, waited, then luck or instinct or the Great Spirit Wakantanka told him to jink left and dive, just as the radar lock warning howled in his earphones and the paleface fired a missile. The missile arced downward after him, but the angle was too steep for it; Red Cloud shot past below it with a hundred yards to spare. He reversed his turn and jammed the throttles forward, itching to complete the loop and fire one of his own missiles at the paleface—or at least one of the miniature nonexplosive coup sticks—but he followed orders instead, turning back toward the park while the paleface frantically turned to pursue him. The missile, its radar lock lost, sped on toward the ground until the paleface pilot detonated it by remote.

  “Camera rolling,” Sitting Bull said. “Crossing Central Park.”

  “I’m right behind you.” Red Cloud aimed for a spot a little to the south of Sitting Bull’s path, started his cameras, and made his own pass over the park. He kept his eyes on the radar screen, but the paleface pilot who’d shot at him was just completing his turn, miles back, and the other pilot was flying an intercept that would put him well into Indian territory before he made contact.

  It took the speeding planes only a few seconds to reach the Hudson. “Drop armament,” Red Cloud said, pushing his panic button. His missiles, wing tanks, and belly tank dropped away, reducing the Eagle’s air resistance. Sitting Bull did the same, and both planes shot toward home base at top speed, their smoke signatures streaming out behind them.

  The palefaces pursued them, of course, but with loaded planes they had no hope of catching up, and within a few more miles an entire squadron of Eagles rose up out of the west and chased them back to the Island. Red Cloud grinned at the radio traffic:

  “Hey, Red Cloud; you scared this guy’s hair white!”

 
“It isn’t white; it’s blond.”

  “So it is. Hey, I bet this is that hotshot new guy we heard about. The one who—”

  “Look out! Missile!”

  “I’m clear.”

  “Trigger-happy bastard. Maybe we should teach him a lesson.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I’m on him. Arming the stick. Targeting … locked. Stick away.”

  “Look at ’im dodge! Forget it, buddy, you’re outnumbered.”

  “Hah, hit ’im right on the canopy. I count coup, Yellow Hair.”

  “Yee-ha! My turn!”

  A scant thirty minutes later Brave Joseph showed them the pictures. “They’re missile silos, all right,” he said, pointing at a half-dozen buildings clustered together near the middle of the park. “From the side they look like basic apartment complexes, but when you look down from above, you can see the launch tubes inside. We count ten per building. That means sixty missiles, and if they’ve figured how to build multiple warheads that could mean first-strike capability to as many as six hundred separate targets.”

  “So what’re we going to do about it?” Sitting Bull asked.

  “Tecumseh’s arranging to meet with Lee right now. He’ll threaten to blockade the Island if they don’t dismantle the silos. Trouble is, we think they’ve already got this one operational.” Joseph pointed at the southernmost “building.”

  “You think they’d actually launch?” Red Cloud asked. “We’d blow the Island off the map, and most of Europe, too, if they did.”

  “Who knows what those crazy palefaces would do? They don’t fight like civilized people.”

  “I say we take ’em out before they try it,” Sitting Bull said.

  “That’s not our decision. Tecumseh’s the chief.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s going to be chief of a bunch of radioactive braves if he decides wrong.” Sitting Bull looked down at the photographs again. “I think we ought to scalp the bastards once and for all, and do it now.”